Tag Archives: David Doherty

Summer’s favourites wander around the world a little taking in novels from Scandinavia, South Africa and the USA, beginning in June with Monte Carlo, a book by a Belgian author. Ending on the night of the first moon landing in 1969, Peter Terrin’s novella tells the tale of a God-fearing mechanic who becomes obsessed with the actress whose life he saves when she’s caught in a conflagration. He’s badly burnt, but she’s unscathed. Jack arrives home a hero but as the year passes with no word from DeeDee, no acknowledgment of his sacrifice, his obsession with her deepens. From its vividly dramatic opening, this beautiful dreamlike novella had me in its grip. I’m hoping that more of Terrin’s fiction will be translated soon.

Tom Malmquist’s InEvery Moment We Are Still Alive is a piece of autofiction that also deals with trauma, this time the death of his partner a few weeks after the premature birth of their daughter, beginning with Karin’s emergency hospital admission and ending with their daughter’s first day at pre-school. Stunned by grief and exhausted by lack of sleep, Tom finds himself caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare in which he must prove himself to be Livia’s father. The novel plumbs the depths of Tom’s grief through which shine flashes of joy as he learns how to take care of his beloved daughter. I’m not entirely taken with the idea of autofiction but this is an intensely immersive, heart-wrenching book which I hope proved cathartic for its author.

June ended with Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Landwhich explores the divisions between town and country through the clever, involving story of the Bredin family. Lottie – furious with the philandering Quentin but too broke to divorce him – finds a dilapidated house in Devon and takes the entire, thoroughly metropolitan family off there, renting out their London house in the hope of raising enough money so that both she and Quentin can buy separate homes. What she hasn’t bargained for is something nasty in the woodshed. A little like a modern Trollope, Craig is a vivid chronicler of the way we live now. I’m looking forward to the next instalment of her loosely linked state-of-the-nation novels.

Just one book from July but it’s a particularly lovely one. In Victoria Redel’s Before Everything five women, friends since school, come together when one of them is dying having called a halt to the emotional rollercoaster her illness has taken her on. The women gather themselves around Anna for what may be their last day of the constant conversation the five of them share, struggling with the imminent loss of the woman they love dearly. Redel uses a fragmentary structure for her novel – full of flashbacks, vignettes and anecdote – capturing the intimacy of death when the world falls away, all attention focused on the dying. It’s a gorgeous empathetic and tender portrait of friendship, shot through with a dry humour which steers it well clear of the maudlin.

Death and friendship are also themes in the first of August’s two favourites: Jens Christian Grøndahl’s Often I Am Happy. Ellinor stands in front of her dearest friend Anna’s grave and tells her about the death of Georg who was once Anna’s husband before she died in a skiing accident together with her lover, Henning, then Ellinor’s partner. Georg and Ellinor were married for decades but she has always felt she was leading Anna’s life. She’s a stepmother who has never felt the children were hers; accepted by the family but standing at its edge. Now that Georg has died there is no one that she wishes to talk to except Anna. Ellinor’s grief is such a private, painful thing, not a rending of garments or tearing of hair but a constant ache of absence as much for Anna as it is for Georg. This loving, forgiving friendship is at the heart of Grøndahl’s quietly powerful novella.

Summer’s last book is Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg, an homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway which follows a set of disparate characters through a single day as one of them prepares for a party on December 6th, 2013. Just as Woolf’s novel reflected the preoccupations of her time, so Johannesburg offers us a snapshot of South Africa’s capital on the day after the death of Nelson Mandela. Melrose deftly knits the many threads of her narrative together, shifting smoothly between her characters and offering a microcosm of this complex country where white privilege often shuts itself away behind razor wire and navigates the constant stream of black hawkers from comfortable, air-conditioned cars. It’s an ambitious, expertly executed novel which made me wonder why I hadn’t read Melrose’s first book, Midwinter.

That’s it for summer, a season I cling on to for as long as I can. Autumn gets off to a darker start although not as Gothic as I was expecting…

All links are to my reviews on this blog. If you’d like to catch up with the first two instalments of my 2017 books of the year they’re here and here. And for those of you who’re flagging, it’s the home straight on Monday.

‘Check ignition and may God’s love be with you’ is the achingly familiar quote which prefaces Peter Terrin’s novella. It might be tempting to think that Monte Carlo was written after David Bowie’s death last year but it was originally published in Holland in 2014. Sometimes it’s a struggle to work out quite why an author has chosen a particular epigraph for their novel but in this case it couldn’t be more appropriate. Ending on the night of the first moon landing in 1969, Terrin’s novel tells the tale of a God-fearing mechanic who becomes obsessed with the actress whose life he saves.

Jack Preston is the chief mechanic of Sutton’s Formula One team. It’s the job he’s worked towards since he was thirteen, losing himself in tinkering with a local farmer’s Massey Ferguson two years after the death of his father. Jack and his team are readying themselves for the start of the 1968 Grand Prix but the crowd only has eyes for DeeDee, the young, delicately beautiful movie actress who has captured everyone’s hearts including that of the Prince whose wife was once a starlet. As DeeDee walks towards him, Jack catches the scent of fuel on the air, leaping towards her just in time to save her from a conflagration. DeeDee’s bodyguard drags them both away from the flames – DeeDee unscathed but Jack badly burnt. As Jack lies in hospital, a journalist comes to interview him, his answers haltingly translated by his nurse with her sketchy grasp of English. Jack arrives home a hero, not least to his wife, but as the year passes with no word from DeeDee, no acknowledgment of his sacrifice, Jack’s obsession with her deepens until, as the villagers’ admiration leaks away, he slides into madness.

From its vividly dramatic opening, this beautiful dreamlike novella had me in its grip. The first section is a cinematic intersplicing of images from the racetrack before the focus is switched to Jack and the aftermath of his dramatic rescue. Terrin’s writing is strikingly arresting: ‘Sunlight streams in through the vast windows of the reception area, reflected by the distant azure of the sea with a brilliance that verges on the audible’; ’A roar of laughter from the fat man punches a hole in the dignified serenity of the grandstand’. Jack’s increasingly delusional obsession is chillingly convincing, offset by the odd flash of humour. There’s a contemporary resonance in the portrayal of celebrity although DeeDee put me in mind of Princess Diana, several decades after the events portrayed in the novel. From the fragmentary structure which suits the novel beautifully to its oblique ending, this is a meticulously crafted piece of fiction. Terrin’s written four novels besides this one but it appears that only The Guard has been translated. Let’s hope MacLehose Press have plans to publish the other three.